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by Adriano Tedde *
The victory of Joe biden The US presidential elections will have positive effects on l’Australia. Trump’s isolationist and protectionist policies were harmful for this country that traditionally relies on the military power of the United States for the security of its region, as well as the free trade for its economic prosperity. The arrival of the new tenant of the White House should therefore reassure the australians waiting a return to “normality” in relations with the great ally.
Yet despite the expected benefits Australia will enjoy with the new administration taking office in Washington, anyone who read the headlines of the leading national newspaper on Sunday morning, just hours after the decisive victory of Biden in Washington. Pennsylvania, I would have thought Australia was one of the countries included in the disappointed list for the defeat of Trump along with Hungary, Serbia and Saudi Arabia.
While the websites of the world’s leading newspapers reported the news of Biden’s victory as a major event, on the website of The australian Information about what just happened in the US was lost in a sea of fatal regrets and premonitions. “Much to worry about with Biden in charge,” headlines the associate editor’s comment. “He can also be the president-elect, but he is Biden able to rule?Asks Paul Kelly, a long-respected analyst who didn’t raise the same issue with Trump’s election four years ago. And again, “Because the possible defeat of Trump does not mark the end”; “Trump and the real resistance”; “Elitè excluded from the choir”. Meanwhile, in this series of groans, not a single line informed Australian readers that for the first time in American history there will be a woman in the vice presidency.
For decades The australian It is the voice of Australia, the leading medium of communication, the most authoritative source of information in the country. Today the magazine seems a political body, a biased newspaper that is increasingly leaning towards far-right, denial and intolerant positions. How do you explain this pro-Trumpian litany in the best-selling newspaper in a country historically? friend of the United States, led by a government that calls itself conservative-moderate? The answer is simple and everything is contained in a name: Rupert murdoch.
The Australian mogul is the director of News Corp, a media giant that owns more than 140 newspapers in Australia, as well as television, digital services and a rugby team. the 2. 3% of what you can buy in an Australian newsstand belongs to Murdoch. And in the case of newspapers sold in metropolitan areas, this percentage rises to 75%. If we exclude theAustralian financial review, the Australian equivalent of ours Sole24Ore, The australian it is the only national newspaper, that is, a newspaper that is not linked to a specific metropolitan or regional reality, as are all other newspapers in the country, among‘Herald Sun Melbourne, the Daily telegraph Sydney and the Mail from Brisbane (all, of course, owned by Murdoch).
Murdoch has been the protagonist of long years of painstaking lobbying campaigns that have gradually led to the liberalization of the sector and thus allowed its dominance over the media. In line with Murdoch’s business strategy and ideology, conservative politicians have for years been targeting the public company ABC, accusing it of being left. A steady decline in public funding and the elimination of unwanted journalists have led to the dilution of the contents of ABC’s radio and television newscasts.
The most obvious case of this negative outcome for public information was seen earlier this year when, during the devastating forest fires in the southeast of the country – the worst in history – foreign media offered much more detailed and timely reporting than those of the ABC, which never put the government facing their responsibilities in the mismanagement of the emergency. This was happening while Murdoch’s media kept insisting that the fires were the work of the gods. arsonists.
Concerned for the health of the Australian media, two political rivals, former prime ministers Kevin Rudd (Labor) e Malcolm Turnbull (liberal), joined their voices for the first time to sound the alarm against Murdoch’s position of power. The first, in no uncertain terms, called Murdoch’s media “a cancer for democracy.” The second said Murdoch’s News Corp has already badly damaged Western democracy, particularly in the United States and Australia.
This week Rudd will deposit a collection of half a million signatures which accompanies the request of a commission of inquiry into the undue and immeasurable action of political influence exercised nationally and globally by the Murdoch company. Rudd is aware that commission could never see the light of day, requiring a majority of votes that will not be achieved with the current Parliament, but affirmed that the initiative’s first objective is to start a debate currently completely absent on the Australian public scene.
Turnbull, In turn, last April he revealed that he was the main political actor in the creation in 2013 of the Australian online page of the British newspaper. The Guardian. Although the newspaper is openly left-wing, the conservative Turnbull had wanted its entry into Australia favor pluralistic information, sensing since then the populist drift of the Australian media at the hands of Murdoch. With Trump leaving the scene in the last two days
Turnbull has again spoken with the ABC microphones to attack Murdoch especially on the subject of climate changes. The former prime minister accused The australian have become one propaganda tool and to have reduced the environmental emergency from an irrefutable scientific question to a debate on political values and identities. By doing so, the newspaper would have deprived Australians of clear and objective information based on Scientific data they are systematically rejected by their columns. By downplaying the problem and directing public opinion into positions of denial, Murdoch’s reporters were able to inhibit any political action aimed at combating climate change in a country that holds sad environmental records.
Now that US environmental policy is expected to change, Turnbull believes this will offer Australia an opportunity to initiate new energy policies and environmental ones that look to the future. But the Murdoch press will not stop tarnishing the name of all the people in the government who dare to restart the political confrontation on the subject, as happened to Turnbull himself during his premier at the 2018.
This new debate has been opened for now in the silence of the current liberal prime minister, Scott morrison, declared an enemy of the public broadcasting service, which since 2018 has taken positions increasingly closer to Trump, especially towards the China and the issue of climate change. Positions Murdoch’s press has always praised. Now it will be interesting to see if and how the new direction of American politics will give force to new initiatives aimed at curbing the spread of media populism in Australia and if this country in the not too distant future can once again be a nation of progressive inspiration such as the close New Zealand from Jacinda Arden, where Murdoch’s media empire has not arrived.
* I worked as a diplomat for the Italian Republic between 2004 and 2016 and was Consul of Italy for the state of Western Australia, in Perth. Between 2011 and 2015, I attended hundreds of compatriots who arrived here attracted by the rich economy, experiencing first-hand the phenomenon of the hemorrhaging of the brains who fled Italy. In 2016, after the birth of my first daughter, I became a university researcher in Australia. I remain deeply interested in Italian politics and closely follow the rapid evolution of its social, political and economic life.
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